The new men of Elizabeth I's England, Clive Aslet tells us, "were desperate to show off, frantic to build houses". Judging by his enchanting history of English houses from Norman times to today, this is true of any age. The reasons for building vary, from the basic need for shelter to a desire for a pavilion to watch deer-hunting, and the types range from baroque fantasies in south London to model farms in the Cumbrian hills, but in every case somebody has an urge to show off. Even the "jetties", the wooden beams that carried the projecting upper storeys of medieval houses, were advertisements for the carpenters, who wanted to astound viewers with the mysteries of their trade, while the exposed beams were pounced on by the carvers, eager to "adorn them with geometrical patterns or turn them into dragons".

Such detail is typical of this book, which takes particular houses as jumping-off points to explain the influences, building practices and patterns of life that lie behind period styles. The journey carries us from the stone-built Norman manor house at Boothby Pagnell to a Puritan merchant's house in Marlborough, from the early dawn of Italianate classicism in Lodge Park at Sherborne House in Gloucestershire, to the suburban delights of Worksop and the Butterfly House in Surrey.

Aslet, who edited Country Life for many years and is now its editor-at-large, is the perfect guide, combining long experience with a light touch. None of the houses he describes is a vast, echoing stately home, with the exception of Elveden Hall, which he craves as an indulgence, having fallen in love with the place one freezing January, wearing a heavy overcoat and shivering by an electric fire, as the contents of the house were catalogued. We feel the author's amused, note-taking presence throughout. Indeed, the journey begins with Aslet's own stuccoed terrace house in Pimlico, part of the Albertopolis that followed the great exhibition of 1851. Twenty years later it was occupied by five women: two widows, mother and daughter; a steward's wife and her baby daughter; and a lodger, who, as Aslet notes, carried shades of Bleak House, being described in the census as "occupied in the Court of Chancery". The whole history of the area, and the city, as well as the house, rises before us - the coming of the railway, the covering of the stinking open sewer, the descent of polite housing into lodging houses and brothels, and its slow rise again to respectability.

This widening out is typical. A look at an Arkwright weaver's home in Cromford leads to early industrial housing; a trip to Gilbert White's The Wakes in Hampshire, to antiquarianism and painterly attitudes to nature. Pugin's The Grange at Ramsgate prompts a colourful account not only of the Gothic revival, but also of the rise of the seaside resort and the bathing station and, more alarmingly, of the anti-Catholic feeling that led to the young Pugin's being abused while out walking and to excrement being smeared on the walls of The Grange: hence the nervous architect's extra-heavy front door.

There are a sprinkling of architects here in addition to Pugin, including Vanbrugh at Maze Hill in Greenwich and Lutyens at Marsh Court in Hampshire, who determinedly used clunch, a hard chalk, so that the house would shine like the scars on the chalk hills around. Most of the owners or builders are less well known. Sometimes a house shelters an exotic ghost, such as Duleep Singh in his rooms encrusted with Indian plasterwork at Elveden. Sometimes the owners' stories are woven into the fabric of English history, such as the swashbuckling Sir Richard Grenville, who owned Buckland Abbey in Devon after the Dissolution. Sometimes, too, small details of the occupants' daily lives, their tussles with the garden or their difficult choice of wallpaper, emerge from diaries and letters, such as those of Marion Sambourne and her family in Kensington, or from hoarded ephemera including the copybook and post-office book of William Straw, proud president of the Worksop and District Grocers' Association in the late 19th century.

Rather engagingly, however, Aslet's most lyrical prose is reserved for building materials. England, we learn, wears a band of limestone like a sash, slung over her shoulder at Yorkshire, slanting across from Lincolnshire to Dorset, before trailing to the channel at Lyme Regis. The clay of the Thames basin produces bricks with "fantastic names - paviours, pickings, rough paviours, washed stocks, grey stocks, grizzles, place bricks, shuffs". The timber of medieval England has its precise uses: tough elm for floorboards and coffins, flexible yew for longbows, ash for cart shafts and wheels, hard box for pestles and mortars, sycamore for milk pails "because it imparted no taste" and oak, of course, for building.

As must by now be clear, the easy style makes quotation irresistible. (I particularly like John Dutton of Lodge Park, "a puny, hunchbacked man" whose monument in the local church suggests a saintly side, showing him "pre-packed, so to speak, in his winding sheet, tied up at the top like a haggis".) The author can summon up places as well as people, and is helped in this by Mai Osawa's precise, evocative drawings. Informative and entertaining, effortlessly conjuring up the houses of the past, and the lives of those who lived in them, The English House is a thorough treat.